What is a 'new world city' anyway?

When then-lord mayor Campbell Newman launched Brisbane's "new world city" campaign in 2009, the immediate response could almost be summed up in one word.

"What?"

Brisbane is taking its place as a world city.

Photo: Glenn Hunt

It was a question that had stuck with The Business of Cities founder Greg Clark since he first saw it during a visit to Queensland with the World Bank in 2011.

"I'd never seen that statement before and I didn't particularly know what it meant at the time, but as I thought about it, I found it a very beguiling idea," Dr Clark said at a Brisbane Marketing lunch this week.

Greg Clark
Chairman and Founder of Business of Cities.

Photo: Supplied

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"So I've spent the four years since visiting Brisbane for the first time thinking what does that mean?"

Now, Dr Clark says he has the answer.

"Because [Brisbane] punches above its weight, is essentially the answer," he said.

"It's only the 172nd biggest city in the world, but it's the 80th most globally connected.

"It's in the top 30 per cent of the world's fastest growing cities, it's got world class foreign direct investment, a competitive labour market, a highly appealing development and lifestyle model and it's an international student city."

Dr Clark said a new world city must have a metropolitan economy in excess of $100 billion.

"It's not huge, but it's big enough to offer a scale of opportunity and asset that's interesting to the outside world," he said.

A new world city, Dr Clark said, must also have some "globally oriented" business clusters.

"They're a group of cities that compete with each other on the basis of very high quality of life, with incredible natural assets and character combined with the ability to specialise in one or two areas of activity where they can be genuinely globally competitive," he said.

"The path that leads to these cities succeeding is the smaller size, the specialisation, the life/work balance, efficient infrastructure is absolutely key for them because that's the way the liveability is delivered."

But Brisbane still had some ground to make up, Dr Clark said.

"The world is not confident, yet, that Brisbane has cultural depth," he said.

"It looks to me like, on the one hand Brisbane has a very strong identity as an Australian Queensland city and that conveys a certain message about what people like to do with their time.

"And on the other hand, the things that you do have here that are global and diverse cultural assets are not that visible.

"So there's a challenge here to make Brisbane's diversity and globalness more visible in order to score more highly on some of those cultural and liveability ranks."

Lord Mayor Graham Quirk lists Dr Clark, along with former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, as the two most influential people in shaping his leadership of Brisbane.